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Published: February 13th 2010
This blog is late not just because I’m lazy but also because I’ve been unable to get onto Travelblog for nearly three weeks for reasons I’ll explain in the next two or three blogs, and because my computer crashed. This blog covers approximately the period 17-24 January. To some degree I do kind of feel like I didn’t do India as well as I might have done, and maybe I should have come back to SE Asia a bit earlier. Anyway, I flew from Kolkata, India to Bangkok, Thailand. From Hindu temples and cows and a dense blanket of humanity, to Buddhist temples and a less dense blanket of humanity. And nary a cow to be seen. I found this to be a bit of a culture shock, particularly in modern Bangkok itself. How can they cram that many people into such a large city without cows to eat all the rubbish? They allow their young women outdoors in public! And the men seldom urinate in public. They have almost no beggars and those that do hide away, as if begging is not an ancient and noble art. It’s all very strange. But don’t get me wrong. India is great. One
Damnoen Saduak - floating markets
I snapped this photo holding the camera over my head. That's me in the foreground.word that will never be used to describe it is “clinical”.
Funnily enough, on the first night or two in Bangkok I ended up staying in what seems to me to be the Indian part of downtown Bangkok. For the first time in weeks I ate Indian food. I guess it wasn’t genuine Indian food though because it had meat other than chicken, and it didn’t make me ill. I had a week in Thailand, after which I was going to visit Myanmar. I was hoping to get my visa in one day, then do a quick sortie up to Laos to see the Plain of Jars, which isn’t the reason everybody else goes to Laos but there you go.
It was here I met up with Adam, an American backpacking around SE Asia. He’d been reading my blog and contacted me through facebook and suggested that we should do Myanmar together. He’s doing things better than I did, taking his time, whereas I kind of regret racing through this area so fast earlier last year. It gives him time to tap into the traveller grapevine and also often travel with other people. Although he’s not necessarily the
sort of person I’d spend an inordinate amount of time with in the real world, it’s much better travelling with someone else or a small group, especially if they’re strangers so you can just split when you start to annoy each other.
Anyway, we arranged to meet at the Myanmar embassy on the Monday morning, after I’d had a night out exploring some local festival on Silom Road with a Sri Lankan gem dealer. After introductions and such-like Adam and I both filled in our visa application forms, and got into the queue. I was hoping to get mine processed the same day, so that I could race up to Laos, and Adam although he didn’t have any plans was kind of hoping for the same. He submitted his form and was told it would take two working days. I was next. They told me it would take two working days and cost 800 Thai Baht. I asked if there was a way to get it expedited. The conversation with the grumpy little embassy staff man from M... went something like this:
“huh?”
“Can I get it expedited?”
“...”
“Can I get it sooner? .... Quicker? .... Not Wednesday
- today?”
“When you fly to Myanmar?”
“Not for a week, but I am going to Laos tomorrow, so I need my passport then.”
“Wah zee aye oh.”
“pardon?”
He punched the number 1380 into his calculator and showed it to me ... “Wah zee aye oh Thai baht.”
“Ah, so if I pay 1380 baht, I can get it today? This evening? Today?”
“ah.”
Knowing that Adam was also hoping to get it done sooner I called out to him and explained quickly. He stuck his head in and asked the embassy guy if he could get the same thing.
“You travel together?” he asked, waving his hand at both of us.
How do you answer that in simple English to someone who seems to be in such a hurry? “Yes,” said I. “No,” said Adam.
“No No No!” He shook his head grumpily.
“Oh, just me,” I said, since Adam wasn’t too fussed.
“No. Eigh’ hun’red baht.”
“But you just told me 1380 Baht.”
“No.”
“Why not? Just me, not him.”
“No.”
“So what was that you told me about 1380?”
“No, too much.”
I don’t get it. So because I had to wait until Wednesday afternoon
for my Myanmar visa, I didn’t get to go to Laos. Instead we ended up going up to the floating markets at Damnoen Saduak, then back to Bangkok to pick up our visas on Wednesday, then to a World Heritage-listed National Park called Khao Yai, and back via the historical town of Ayuthaya to a day in the madness of Khao San Road before the early morning flight to Myanmar. Actually, other than this annoyance, getting the visas turned out to be easy, even for Americas, which was our first surprise for a country with such a bad reputation. The form asked some questions about employment which aren’t too common, but all in all it was an easier process than for many other countries.
The Lonely Planet recommends getting to Damnoen Saduak early in the morning to see it before all the other tourists arrive in daytrips from Bangkok. We did this, but since the market seems to mainly cater for tourists this was too early. We got a boat to take us around, and yes it's a market that floats, since it's made of lots of vendors in small boats (and some tourist shops on stilts out over
the water) but it's probably not worth going all the way for, and if you do want to see it it's probably just as good to go there in a day trip from Bangkok.
Khao Yai national park turned out to be cold and rainy. It’s pretty hard to get around by oneself, since it’s a fair distance from the closest accessible town of Pak Chong, so we booked a spot on a tour which came highly recommended. There turned out to be four of us altogether, on the back of a ute. After the drive to the park entrance I was the only one who opted to pay the extra money for an elephant ride, which was quite a good experience. Since I was the only one on the elephant, the mahout soon had me off the big metal seat and sitting on the elephant’s neck. I never realised how big elephants’ necks are, even small elephants. So that was fun. Then we drove around and saw lots of various kinds of deer, lots of monkeys, and a few strange birds. We did a walk through the jungle for two or three hours over some waterfalls, culminating in
the waterfall where apparently Leonardo DiCaprio jumped off in “The Beach”, where the guide left us to teleport back to where we’d left the car and drove it back with a supply of cold drinks and watermelons. Along the walk we saw a crocodile which was much bigger than I’d expected, and lots of elephants footprints and dung but no actual elephants. Hopping along the rocks over the river and along its edge, I fell in three times, while the others fell in a grand total of zero times. I guess they weren’t trying hard enough. On the drive back we saw some small tree snake and took photos of each other holding a small snake. While photographing monkeys on the road, one jumped in and stole a sealed bag of cold potato chips from the guide’s girlfriend or whoever she was. The rain cleared up for a few hours in the afternoon, but the clouds set in again on the way home shortly before we got the scenic viewpoint on our second attempt. Still, it’s worth seeing and it’s not that far from Bangkok. From the posh hotels between Pak Chong and the park entrance, it’s clear that a
Khao Yai National Park
the mahout was OK at taking photos lot of Bangkokers think the same.
That night we all ate street food on the streets of Pak Chong which seemed strangely devoid of foreigners. I got a perfectly good meal of rice and some kind of chicken stew, quite delicious, but I was still a bit hungry, so I got something that was cooking over a skewer like satay. I assumed it was some kind of seafood, but when I unravelled it the best we could work out was that it was intestines. It tasted rubbery but not too bad, and didn’t make me ill. I’d wanted to get the big frogs which were sitting there raw and skewered, with their skin pulled up over their heads like a child who can’t get his jumper (American: “sweater”) all the way off, and their musculard legs and small frontlegs making them look rather human. But I didn’t know how to order them and you generally have to sit near where you ordered the food (so you don’t steal their cutlery or crockery) so it would have made it a bit difficult since the others were sitting some distance away.
Certainly none of the buses I went on anywhere
in India are in any way the same beast as the ones we went on in Thailand. To get from the floating market to the national park, we raced back to Bangkok to pick up our visas and then made our way back out to a different outer suburb for a different bus station (why do they always put bus stations in such remote locations?). The bus stations are bigger and fancier than some airports. It was so nice to have a seat all to myself, with no dust anywhere, reclining (as opposed to permanently reclined) seats, a driver who wasn’t suicidal and could actually see through his windscreen, and all the other mod cons.
Anyway, Ayuthaya is a bit of a tourist attraction, but it’s nice enough. The capital of Thailand until just a few hundred years ago, it’s another World Heritage site because of all the historical temples. The old town is mainly on a strange island formed by the confluence of three rivers, which gave it its importance in ancient times (both because of trade and because of its easy defensibility). To this day ships and barges can be seen chugging up and down the river.
It would probably be a lot more meaningful if you knew a lot about Thai history, because after a while all temples look the same. Scoffing at the idea of hiring bicycles, we set off to walk around the island, but after a couple of temples we gave up and opted to concentrate on the ones inside the island, and to take a taxi to them. Adam’s a bit more hardcore than me about saving money, so he didn’t want to pay the entrance fee to the main temples, and so I decided not to either and instead we spend a dollar or so on a nice street meal. There’s plenty enough ruins to see without paying to go into the main ones, and of course lots of modern functioning temples. Just as I was walking home it began pouring down rain but I was able to make it to the ferry across the river just before getting too wet. This hotel was a bit of a luxury because it had TV, with a couple of English-language channels, but on the downside it seemed to have an 11 pm curfew (when they locked the front door).
We took the
train back to Bangkok, and that made me feel a bit at home (like India) although I still have trouble accepting that a train can function if the tracks are so clean that one can see them beneath the rubbish. Also, the train seemed to me to be only about one quarter full, as there were only people on the seats. I guess India got into my blood somehow after all. But in India there’s definitely nowhere like Khao San Road. The Lonely Planet writer was clearly smoking the local specialities when he/she described Kolkata’s Sudder Street as “Kolkata’s answer to Khao San Road”. If it is an answer it’s a pretty silly one, kind of like the answer “yes” to the question “should homeopathy be given more credibility than astrology?”
Hold on for next week’s blog, that’ll be a good one. Everyone’s been to Thailand, but not everyone’s been to Myanmar.
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